International
Journal of
Computing and
Information
Sciences

Computing and Information Sciences is a peer
reviewed journal that is committed to timely publication of original
research, surveying and tutorial contributions on the analysis and
development of computing and information science. The journal is
designed mainly to serve researchers and developers, dealing with
information and computing. Papers that can provide both theoretical
analysis, along with carefully designed computational experiments, are
particularly welcome. The journal is published 2-3 times per year with
distribution to librarians, universities, research centers, researchers
in computing, mathematics, and information science. The journal
maintains strict refereeing procedures through its editorial policies in
order to publish papers of only the highest quality. The refereeing is
done by anonymous Reviewers. Often, reviews take four
months to six months to obtain, occasionally longer, and it takes an
additional several months for the publication process.

Abstract:
Segmenting arabic manuscripts into text-lines and words is an important step to make recognition systems more efficient
and accurate. The major problem making this task crucial is the word extraction process: first, words are often a
succession of sub-words where the space value between these sub-words do not respect any rules. Second, the presence
of connections even between non adjacent sub-words in the same text-line, makes word's parts identification and the entire
word extraction difficult. This work proposes an automatic system for arabic handwritten word extraction and recognition
based on 1) localizing and segmenting touching characters, 2) extracting real sub-words and structural features from word
images and 3) recognizing them by a Markovian classifier. The performance of the proposed system is tested using samples
extracted from historical handwritten documents. The obtained results are encouraging. We achieved an average rate of
recognition of 87%.